"Dear customer, bot is your problem?"

On the 8th of November, 2016 when our Prime Minister announced the demonetization of 500 and 1000 rupee notes, one of his stated objectives was to digitalize the banking ecosystem in India.

Ironically, the 2-3 months after this announcement was perhaps the most active period for the banking industry in India, with Indians scrambling to convert their remaining rupee notes, standing in ATM queues to withdraw money while talking about soldiers on the border and signing up forms in bank branches to initiate digital banking processes, setting up wallets etc.

So, a move to reduce active offline banking in the country resulted in the extreme opposite, at least in the short term.

A lot of digitally savvy (which may be a tiny fraction in the overall scheme of things) Indians have been using digital money for a long time. Personally, I do not recall visiting a bank branch in eons. Have never paid a bill offline in eons. Cash withdrawal has also been very sporadic (credit and debit cards serve the purpose mostly). Gone are the days of splitting the bill among colleagues using cash; these days, one person pays (mostly using a credit card) and the rest of us transfer the money via Paytm to that person. I still, childishly, marvel at the speed and efficiency with which all this happens! And I’m thankful about not doing a ‘Statue!’ and uniting my hands in prayer when I pay for something online and the page informs me, ‘Do not close this page. Please wait till you are redirected to the confirmation page!’ An increase in internet speed does help, I notice.

So, we have effectively taken the institution of banks from our offline lives, but banking as a function has moved to our mobile phones and laptops. The internet has been disintermediating middlemen for the longest time and it is no surprise the banker is on the list too. But banking? It involves our money and even if it is self-service, where money is involved, we sure need answers.

What has changed is only the speed and efficiency with which we are able to access and use our money in myriad ways, right from our phones. What has not changed is the severely outdated way banks treat customer care. The phrase ‘bank customer care’ brings to mind a complicated series of number entries into the phone... a series of number presses to navigate the many options read out to us by a cold, emotionless (and pre-recorded) lady and endless hours of waiting. To reach a human capable of understanding a query and resolving it even remotely satisfactorily is much like the mythical tatkal IRCTC booking.

Far from treating customers efficiently, even the modern day mobile wallets like Paytm, Mobikwik etc. have amassed thousands of complaints online, rivalling that of traditional banks. Just try a simple Google search with and the word ‘complaint’. The top result is the graveyard of Indian complaints - consumer complaints.in - which presumably is on top because people want to know where to complain and do a Google search (instead of searching the service provider’s website). And the website, and its many clones, have done excellent SEO to ensure that they, collectively, become the magnet to attract all complaints. Very few of those complaints have any response, but like a benign, silent and passive God, these sites continue to attract all of India’s angry, dejected and upset customers.

It is ironic, actually. When the entire banking system was dependent on offline branches and humans sitting in those branches, we had face-to-face interactions and solved our limited issues. When things started going digital, the human interaction reduced significantly as customers started helping themselves through menus and FAQs. But when things go wrong - and they do, with alarming consistency - getting to a human to explain and seek resolution from seems like a massive chore that you need to allocate a chunk of your day to deal with, starting with being put on hold with terrible muzak or corporate speak.

So what can banks and new-age financial institutions do to deal with this conundrum? The answer perhaps lies in AI (Artificial Intelligence). Customer service industry is a massive algorithm already, with agents being given flowcharts to deal with as many kinds of queries as the organisations can feasibly imagine. There’s no reason why this cannot be automated via chatbots powered by AI. This is already happening in many large customer facing organisations across the world, but the critical limitation of this idea in India revolves around languages. English can be good enough for typing, but an interactive voice-activated bot that can understand and speak a local Indian language, and understand and pick relevant responses from a database would sure be a fantastic USP for any customer facing organisation. With the tremendous developments on the AI front from companies like IBM, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, one day in the near future, we would be able to not only track the wallet payment that didn’t reach the intended recipient, but also select the background music while the bot does the work.

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